Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France

by Iris Moon (Editor), Richard Taws (Editor)

Overview

Time, media, and visuality are watchwords of modernity across science, culture and the arts. At which point in history, though, did they decisively intersect?
Identifying the year 1789 – or the beginning of the French Republic – as the radical moment at which science and the arts came together through radical innovation, this volume questions the reigning teleologies of modern art. Uniting two key areas of 19th-century European art – the French Revolution and 19th-century technological and reproductive experimentation – this novel volume highlights the dual impact these developments had on the art of the period. In doing so, it opens up new and distinctive lines of inquiry around French visual culture, all the while mapping an expanded terrain of art objects, along with makers, consumers and situations of art.

Considering a remarkably broad range of media and practices through an interdisciplinary lens, this diverse collection of essays brings together both eminent and emerging scholars in 18th- and 19th-century French visual culture and enriches our understanding of the period. The essays provide thought-provoking insights on the temporal dimension of art, challenging oversimplified views of artistic progress in modernity. They question teleological narratives, emphasizing the complexity of influences shaping the modern artist. As such, the book offers a new account of the story of French art's modernity by exploring the work of genre painters and miniaturists, sign-painters and animal artists, landscapists, architects, and restorers, as they worked out what it meant to be “post-revolutionary.” As a result, the book promises appeal to academic audiences both within and beyond the discipline of art history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350249523
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/19/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Iris Moon is Assistant Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. She is author of The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France (2016).

Richard Taws is Reader in the History of Art at University College London. He is author of The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (2013), and co-editor, with Genevieve Warwick, of Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (2016). With a collective of scholars in various disciplines, he co-authored Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, 1700-1900 (2018).

Table of Contents

List of Plates
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

Introduction, Iris Moon (MET Museum of Art, USA) and Richard Taws (UCL, UK)
1 Miniature Style, 1789-1815, Jann Matlock (UCL, UK)
2 Rupture, Interrupted: Rococo Recursions and Political Futures in Percier and Fontaine's Napoleon Fan, Iris Moon (MET Museum of Art, USA)
3 A Draughtsman's Contract: Court and Country in the work of Louis Lafitte, Stephen Bann (University of Bristol, UK)
4 Jean-Baptiste Huet's Lions and the Look of the Captive in Post-Revolutionary France, Katie Hornstein (Dartmouth University, USA)
5 First as Farce, then as Tragedy: Art, Vaudeville and Modern Painting after the French Revolution, Steven Adams (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
6 Monsieur Crouton, The Shop Sign Painter: The Unexceptional Artist in Early Nineteenth-Century Satirical Print, Kathryn Desplanque (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
7 Medium as Museum: Marie-Victoire Jacquotot's Porcelain Painting and Post-Revolutionary Fantasies of Preservation, Daniel Harkett (Colby College, USA)
8 The Cultural Politics of Fashion and the French Revolution of 1830, Susan L. Siegfried (University of Michigan, USA)
9 A Storm is Coming: Georges Michel in the Wind, Richard Taws (UCL, UK)

Index

Editorial Reviews

Time, Media and Visuality is brilliantly composed and written, with great essays on a wide range of topics that put forward new objects and well as new ideas. It is also excellently illustrated, with a gallery of color plates that represent a kind of alternative art history. And it encourages us to rethink the relationships between art, technology, and politics in other periods of historical turmoil and subsequent (partial and not always successful) restoration.” —Jan Baetens, Leonardo Reviews

“The editors emphasize the ways in which the events of the Revolution caused a rupture-or, more accurately, many ruptures-in French society, impacting all spheres of artistic production. [...] Taken together, the volume offers not just an introduction to new forms of visuality but new methodological approaches to integrate into our study of this period and beyond.” —Daniella Berman, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide

“What did it mean to be post-Revolutionary? The question catalyzed an efflorescent and experimental media landscape. Reimagining the significance of artists and genres conventionally classified as "minor", this superb volume is every bit as trailblazing as the eclectic objects it brings to life.” —Nina L. Dubin, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

“This is truly a collection where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but what parts! Fans, miniatures, fashion, vaudeville, and paintings of shop-signs, porcelains, clouds, and lions add up in surprising ways: their crosspollination reveals a preoccupation with time in a post-revolutionary moment unlike any other. Read this as an exemplar of what media studies can be, or read it just for the sheer pleasure of each scintillating essay.” —Lynn Hunt, Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA, USA

“A fascinating dive into the period between the French Revolution and Second Empire, going to the heart of a visual and material culture split between the seductions of modernity and nostalgia for the past. It offers original reflections on notions of hierarchy, innovation, and mediation, examining the most varied and unusual artistic expressions in genre painting, the "minor" arts, fashion, and popular print.” —Anne Perrin Khelissa, Maître de conférences, Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, France

“A scintillating and powerful corrective to familiar narratives of French art of the period, Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France brings to the fore an impressive diversity of artistic agents, materials, and forms. Centering on accounts of such habitually marginalized forms as miniature painting and reproductive painting on porcelain, animal painting, wallpaper, and fan design, the volume offers fascinating insights into the ways such representational practices were shaped by a new sense of time's recursivity.” —Sarah Betzer, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Virginia, USA

From the Publisher